How to Build a Homelab: A Beginner's Guide

You cancelled a subscription this week, or someone handed you a spare mini PC, and now a browser tab full of words like Proxmox, LXC, NAS, and reverse proxy is staring back at you. The idea is simple — run your own services at home — but the first search result defines "homelab" and the next one shows a rack that costs more than your car. Neither tells you what to do first.

A homelab is not a rack, not a used enterprise server, and not a $2,000 project. It's one always-on machine running services you own. The hard part was never the hardware — it's that "build a homelab" is really seven smaller decisions stacked on top of each other, and nobody lays them out in order.

What a homelab actually is (and what it isn't)

Strip away the enthusiast photos and a homelab is just a computer that stays on and runs software for you instead of renting that software from someone else. Plex or Jellyfin instead of a streaming subscription. Immich instead of Google Photos. Vaultwarden instead of a paid password manager. Nextcloud or a Samba share instead of cloud storage.

It does not require a 19-inch rack, ECC memory, 10-gigabit networking, or a screaming Dell R730 in a closet. Those are hobbies that grow out of a homelab, not prerequisites for one. Plenty of capable labs are a single fanless box on a shelf.

The reason beginners stall isn't budget or skill — it's sequencing. Buy storage before you've picked a hypervisor and you'll redo it. Expose a service to the internet before you understand remote access and you'll regret it. So the rest of this guide is the order.

The seven decisions, in order

Here is the whole build as a checklist. Each row is one fork, and each links to the deep guide that answers it — work top to bottom and you always know what's next.

Phase	The decision you're making	The deep guide that answers it
1. Hardware	Mini PC, Raspberry Pi, or old laptop?	Best mini PC for a home server
2. Hypervisor	What OS runs the whole box?	Proxmox vs VMware vs Hyper-V
3. Containers	VMs, or containers, or both?	Docker vs virtual machines
4. Topology	Where does Docker actually live?	Proxmox vs Docker: what to run where
5. Storage	Do you need a separate NAS OS?	TrueNAS vs Unraid
6. Remote access	How do you reach it from outside?	WireGuard vs OpenVPN
7. Front door	One clean HTTPS entry point?	Nginx vs Caddy vs Traefik vs HAProxy

You don't have to finish all seven this weekend. Phases 1–3 get you a working lab; 4–7 are what you grow into.

Phase 1 — Pick the hardware

The single most important spec for a machine that runs 24/7 is idle wattage, because you pay for it every hour whether the lab is busy or not. A mini PC with an Intel N100 or N150 idles around 8–14 W; a decommissioned tower server can idle at 60–100 W and cost more in electricity per year than the mini PC cost to buy.

For most first builds, a modern mini PC is the sweet spot: low power, enough RAM headroom for a dozen containers, and quiet enough to live in a living room. A Raspberry Pi 5 is cheaper and fine for a handful of lightweight services, but RAM and I/O become the ceiling fast — and in the 2026 DRAM shortage the price gap has narrowed. An old laptop is the true zero-cost start, with a built-in UPS (its battery) as a bonus.

The full trade-off — idle watts, RAM ceilings, and Proxmox suitability across a mini PC versus a Pi — is worked out with real numbers in our best mini PC for a home server guide.

Phase 2 — Choose a hypervisor

A hypervisor is the operating system that owns the whole machine and carves it into isolated environments. You could install plain Ubuntu Server and stop here — that's a valid, simpler path — but installing a hypervisor first means you can snapshot, back up, and rebuild pieces of your lab without touching the rest.

Proxmox is the default for a reason

Proxmox VE is free, actively developed, has a genuinely good web interface, and runs both full virtual machines (via KVM) and lightweight system containers (via LXC). Its homelab community is enormous, which means every problem you hit has a forum thread and a script already waiting. The alternatives — VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V — have their place, and our hypervisor comparison walks through when each one wins. For a first homelab, Proxmox is the answer that the largest number of tutorials assume.

Phase 3 — Containers or VMs

Once Proxmox owns the box, you decide how to package the things it runs. This is where the two words that confuse everyone show up: virtual machines and containers.

A virtual machine emulates a whole computer with its own kernel — heavy, but completely isolated and bootable like real hardware. A container shares the host's kernel and packages just one application and its dependencies — light, disposable, and starting in under a second. Neither is "better"; they solve different problems, and the concept side of that comparison is laid out in Docker vs virtual machines.

The practical version of the question in a Proxmox lab is subtler: not "VM or container" but "where does Docker live?" The stable pattern is Docker running inside a VM that Proxmox created, rather than directly on the host or in a privileged LXC. That topology, and why it's the one worth copying, is the whole subject of Proxmox vs Docker: what to run where.

Phase 4 — Storage and your NAS

Early on, the disk inside your mini PC is your storage and that's fine. The moment you're hoarding a media library or backing up phones and laptops, you'll want more disks with redundancy — and that's the NAS decision.

You can run network storage as containers on your existing box, or dedicate a machine (or a Proxmox VM with disks passed through) to a purpose-built NAS operating system. TrueNAS and Unraid are the two that dominate homelabs, and they optimize for opposite things — rigid ZFS integrity versus flexible mixed-disk expansion. Which one fits depends on whether your disks match and how much you value one-drive-at-a-time growth; our TrueNAS vs Unraid comparison makes that call concrete.

Phase 5 — The first apps to self-host

This is the payoff phase, and the honest advice is to start with one or two services you'll actually use, not a wall of twenty. A media server is the classic first win: Jellyfin (fully free and open) or Plex (polished, freemium). The trade-offs — transcoding, clients, cost — are covered in Jellyfin vs Plex in 2026.

From there, the usual early additions are Home Assistant for local home automation, Vaultwarden for passwords, Immich for photos, Paperless-ngx for documents, and the *arr stack (Sonarr, Radarr) to feed the media server. Each is a container or two in your Docker VM.

Phase 6 — Reaching your lab from outside

At some point you'll want your services when you're not at home. The wrong way is to forward ports on your router and expose a login page to the entire internet. The right way is a VPN back into your own network, so remote access rides an encrypted tunnel and nothing is publicly exposed.

WireGuard is the modern default — small, fast, and simple to configure; OpenVPN is the older, more configurable workhorse. The comparison and setup trade-offs are in WireGuard vs OpenVPN. Set this up before you open anything to the outside world, not after.

Phase 7 — One clean front door

Once you're running several web apps, each on its own port, remembering `:8096` and `:8080` and `:3000` gets old, and none of them have proper HTTPS. A reverse proxy fixes both: it sits in front of everything, terminates TLS with a real certificate, and routes `jellyfin.yourlab.home` or a subpath to the right service.

Nginx, Caddy, Traefik, and HAProxy each take a different approach — Caddy automates certificates out of the box, Traefik discovers Docker containers automatically, Nginx is the battle-tested generalist. The picking guide is Nginx vs Caddy vs Traefik vs HAProxy for self-hosting. This is the last structural piece; after it, your lab feels like a product instead of a pile of ports.

What I run, and what it costs

My own setup follows exactly this order, and this site's infrastructure runs on it. In my homelab, Proxmox VE sits on the bare metal, a dedicated Debian VM runs Docker and Docker Compose, and the application containers — database, API, frontend, reverse proxy — all live inside that VM. The Proxmox host stays deliberately boring: it only runs VMs, so an app-level mistake can never take down the hypervisor underneath it.

The cost argument is where a homelab quietly wins. A box that idles at 12 W runs to about 105 kWh per year (12 W × 24 h × 365 ÷ 1000). At a German household rate of roughly €0.30/kWh, that's about €31.50 per year in electricity — a few euros a month to replace a stack of subscriptions that each cost more than that per month. The hardware pays itself back, and then keeps paying.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a homelab if I only want Plex?

Not really — if a media server is genuinely all you want, a single machine running Plex or Jellyfin directly is enough, and you can skip the hypervisor. The homelab approach earns its complexity once you want a second and third service, because Proxmox lets them share one box without stepping on each other.

How much does a homelab cost to run per month?

For a low-power mini PC, electricity is the main ongoing cost. A 12 W idle machine is roughly €2–3 per month at typical German rates; the software is overwhelmingly free and open-source. The big spend is the one-time hardware, not the running cost.

Is a Raspberry Pi enough to start?

For a handful of light services — Pi-hole, a small media server, Home Assistant — yes. Its limits are RAM and disk I/O, which you hit quickly once you stack containers. A mini PC gives far more headroom for a similar price in the current market, which is why our hardware guide leans that way.

Proxmox, or just Docker on Ubuntu?

Both are legitimate. Docker on a plain Ubuntu Server install is the simplest possible start and perfectly fine for one machine running a few apps. Proxmox is worth it the moment you want multiple isolated environments — a Docker VM alongside a NAS VM alongside a test box — on a single piece of hardware.